Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
-
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly?
If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran..
Thanks,
John
-
Hi Dale,
Really stupid question, how do I look at the CSS to identify that? I've viewed source but cant see that information anywhere on the page.
If you wouldn't mind, could you point me in the right direction of some information about this issue, I would be interested in understanding it better, but until you brought it to my attention, I had no idea even to look for it
J
-
Ryan and James,
Take a closer look at the div class of the lightbox (class="contact"). In the CSS for the page in question we find the following:
div.contact {
display: none;
visibility: hidden;}
In my opinion, you're asking the wrong question. This isn't about lightboxes or DA at all; it's about the display:none; and visibility: hidden; elements.
There is no shortage of information about that here on SEOmoz or in the Google Webmaster Forums.
-
Interesting supposition. i've got absolutely no idea if a stronger page changes the specific parts of a page are parsed.
Shouldn't be too difficult to work out though:
If we work on the logic that an exact match search result indicates that the text is being read and used by google, you can then compare javascript parsing across strong and weak pages.
Another way would be to look at the cached text only version across pages and see if there is any difference, although I think I prefer the first suggestion
Seems simple, although it probably isn't
j
-
I agree with your assessment James.
Before I accept this information I would like to ask if you are aware of any other similar examples of lightbox use on a page with better stats? The DA of this page is only 31, and PA is 1. I would like to rule out the idea Google may crawl deeper if the page was deemed more important.
-
James is correct. Your lightbox content is not visible to a Google Bot.
You can see from an exact match search of some text from the page that Google has indexed the visible text: http://bit.ly/nDQLlM
The only place that the exact text from the lightbox appears in the Google index is on this thread: http://bit.ly/mRQICc
-
Sorry for butting in on an old(ish) post, but I have a different opinion on this...
Correct the text used in the example does show up in the source code as HTML, but I dont think that indicates that google is reading that text.
For me there are two ways to check to see if Google is reading text:
1. Do an exact match (quotation marked) search in google.
2. Look at the cached version of the page in google in text only version.
From that information, the lightbox data is not showing up and for me that would indicate that the text is not being read.
Also, an interesting point to note is that 'Fetch as Googlebot' should not be used as a method of identifying what text is being parsed according to searchengineland http://searchengineland.com/see-what-googlebot-sees-on-your-site-27623
Feel free to prove me wrong!
thanks
james
-
I have read that article before. Keep in mind it is from 2008. Technology and Google have advanced substantially in the past 3 years.
100% of the text in all your lightbox is fully viewable by Google presently. William and I both looked and we see the text in your html source code. That means Google can see it as well.
-
Those are not issues on your site.
Your light box images are fully crawlable. Google sees all of the images and the text descriptions. You definitely want to add an ALT description. Otherwise you are in great shape.
-
thanks for all the responses guys.
my thoughts were most of the time it depends upon the script because some script hide data from the viewers while it shows the same data to Search Engine which turns out Clocking issue on website.. this could be proved very dangerous for the website.
Also seems like google does not crawl the images as often than normal web page.. because it hide the contents and creates unauthenticated website.
-
Sure thing brother!
-
Thank you William. Somehow I missed it during my review of the source code.
-
Hi Ryan,
Yes, I just did a search for the text I found in the Lightbox description for the Coco & Max logo. Right there. I've attached a couple images to show what I found.
Is this underneath a Javascript? I'd be interested to learn about the differences between different scripts as I see myself building sites that I would like to use the most SEO beneficial one.
-
Hi William.
Thanks for the feedback. I did look at the HTML and the real text is NOT visible. I am pretty sure that Google can read it even in the javascript, but I am not certain so I did not wish to offer that conclusively. If I knew which version was in use, such as Highslide, I could check and offer a confirmation.
The first image shared is the Coco and Max logo. If you click on that image the Lightbox will appear with a description that says "The Jenn Lee Group developed photography, business cards, expo-banner plus an ecommerce website for Coco and Max using a logo they had already developed. The Jenn Lee Group can pick up the ball at whatever stage you are currently in towards your marketing and advertising initiatives. Call us today! 401-885-3200"
I do not see that text snippet anywhere in the page's source code. Also, there are a total of 7 pictures offered in a group with that first image, each which their own text.
If you have any additional information, I would love to learn as well.
-
Lightbox should have zero negative impact in regards to SEO, providing you have effectively labeled your photos. I love the look of it, and although has a similar effect to flash, they have nothing to do with eachother in regards to negative SEO.
-
Hey Ryan,
The Original Poster is actually talking about the text descriptions of each logo that is listed.
The easy way to figure this out is to look in the HTML. If it's real text, then Google can crawl it. In your case it is.
So the content you have will be indexed.And you can do as Ryan suggested and add Alt Attribute to each image. It will help as well.
-
The biggest gap I see on your site is your images are all missing ALT tags. Search engines don't see images the way people do. By providing an alt tag, you can offer a description of each image. For example your first image alt tag might be "logo Coco & Max Doggie Distinctions".
There are many packages of javascript code which use Lightbox so if you want a more definite answer you would need to take a look at your specific package. Highslide and Suckerfish are two examples of Lightbox javascript coding packages. For additional research you can check out this article.
Another note. I would recommend changing your Meta description to readable text, not a list of key words. Your meta description is what people will see as your listing in search engines. It will not affect your search result ranking.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle images (lazy loading, compressing, caching...) to impact page load and thus SEO?
Hi all, I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images. There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much: Page caching and compressing: standard Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling. Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time. What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP? To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Do uncrawled but indexed pages affect seo?
It's a well known fact that too much thin content can hurt your SEO, but what about when you disallow google to crawl some places and it indexes some of them anyways (No title, no description, just the link) I am building a shopify store and it's imposible to change the robots.txt using shopify, and they disallow for example, the cart. Disallow: /cart But all my pages are linking there, so google has the uncrawled cart in it's index, along with many other uncrawled urls, can this hurt my SEO or trying to remove that from their index is just a waste of time? -I can't change anything from the robots.txt -I could try to nofollow those internal links What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Pages with similar content: Redirect or Canonical? Or something else?
We have two pages on our site with similar content. One was originally a landing page for a marketing campaign, somewhat of a micro-site feel with a lot of content. We recently optimized another page on the site with much of the same content from the original landing page/micro-site. In order to avoid duplicate content, and to let Google know our authority page is the new page, we're wondering what is best practice: Should we... 301 redirect the old page? No index the old page? Keep both pages and use a canonical to tell Google the new page is authority? Or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo_1234b0 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
Video Content, created for links back to our domain landing page.. the right way to do it?
Hi We've just finished a great bit of video content for a page we're trying to push up the serps. I've done some reading around but there are lots of conflicting views. We have created this content (its a city guide) for the purpose of becoming the resource on this topic but we are a new site and we need the links we hope to generate from this, we don't want the links to youtube. Where would you upload the video? Everywhere? One place? Vimeo? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Any idea why I can't add a Panoramio image link to my Google Places page?
Hey guys & gals! Last week, I watched one of the Pro Webinars on here related to Google Places. Since then, I have begun to help one of my friends with his GP page to get my feet wet. One of the tips from the webinar was to geotag images in Panoramio to use for your images on the Places page. However, when I try to do this, I just get an error that says they can't upload it at this time. I tried searching online for answers, but the G support pages that I have found where someone asks the same question, there is no resolution. Can anyone help? PS - I would prefer not to post publicly the business name, URL, etc. So, if that info is needed, I can PM. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | strong11